Archive for the ‘Meals’ Category

There’s more to being the father of a kid with celiac disease than being annoying at restaurants and crying in grocery stores. There’s a lot of freaking out about the presence of gluten and cross-contamination as well. And sometimes, it involves washing dishes. Lots of dishes.

Last night, I went to the silverware drawer to get some forks and knives for dinner. I pulled out a knife and realized that it was covered with Nutella. “Who put a dirty knife back in the drawer?” I called out. “It’s covered with food!”

It doesn’t happen every time, but it happens often enough. There I am, six feet tall, and built like a tank, with a full beard and one lobotomy-covering American-flag headband away from a recurring role on Duck Dynasty, standing in the grocery store aisle crying like a baby. It’s not because mommy won’t buy me Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs but because I won’t buy them for my daughter. Or, more accurately, because I can’t buy them for my daughter. (more…)

In our house, Friday nights are Burrito night. My oldest son has his dance class and, afterward, he and I go pick up burritos in the mission. Naturally, after dancing enthusiastically for an hour, he’s worked up a powerful thirst. Sometimes, therefore, I’ll get an agua fresca — a Mexican fruit drink — for him while our food is being made. Last night, however, he got a lesson instead.

You come to an intersection — a red light means stop and a green light means go. Yellow, well, there are different schools of thought, but the other two are always the same. Around here, we have three “trash” bins — one for actual garbage, one for recyclables, and one for compostables. They’re always black, blue, and green, respectively. There’s never any doubt — food scraps go in the green bin, bottles and cans in the blue one. Doesn’t matter whose house you’re at, you know where to scrape your plate. Unfortunately, not every industry is so considerate.

So we had swim class in the morning and the San Francisco Free Folk Festival in the afternoon. It was a full day, to be sure, but the real challenge was that the two were 40 miles apart. So while the Junior Partner was practicing his up-faces, I took the older two to a nearby Subway to get sandwiches for a quick lunch on the road. Unfortunately, when I ordered a kid’s meal for the three-year-old, it came in a bag emblazoned with the Green Lantern character from the recent film. A film, I will note, that is rated PG-13 by the MPAA and given a 4.7.4 for sex, violence, and profanity by Kids-in-Mind.com.

About once a month, we let our kids buy the school lunch. It’s a welcome break for my wife who normally puts together their midday repast and there are a few menu items they really enjoy. More so than any other, their favorite meal is the chicken nuggets. They really look forward to that. Apparently, they’re not the only ones with a special fondness for school lunch nuggets; two men in Florida really, really like them as well.

How much responsibility does a restaurant have to ensure that healthy options are available for kids and families? At some restaurants, the only healthy item available might be a glass of water and that’s okay, if that’s the sort of establishment they want to be. How about, though, restaurants that try to be “family-friendly” and that offer a “kid’s meal”? Do they have any obligation to make healthy options available, at least as part of the kid’s meals?

Whether you applaud this trend or condemn it will likely depend on how old your kids are — or if you even have kids at all. In Singapore, more and more restaurants are setting a minimum age requirement for their patrons and it has nothing to do with the legal drinking age. Some are even going so far as to ban anyone not yet a teenager.

Most of the time, when you see something advertised on television as being amazing, incredible, or some other superlative, chances are it’s cheaply made and doesn’t work anywhere near as well as they’d have you believe, if it even works at all. Every once in a great while, however, a product comes along that you just know is every bit as clever as they make it seem on telly. I suspect the Gyro Bowl is one of those rare creatures.

Even if you’ve never been to a Hooters restaurant and know nothing about the chain of eateries, chances are you can guess what draws people to them. Sure, I’ve heard tell the chicken wings are good, but it’s not wings that people think of when they think “hooters”. Indeed, the company has been successfully sued by men for not being hired as waitstaff and the employee handbook at one time allegedly required female employees to acknowledge and accept that “the essence of the Hooters concept is entertainment through female sex appeal.”